Riot Sotere's profile

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what champions do you think will benefit more from lost chapter over aether wisp? in terms of AP junglers, I really only play Fiddle, Elise and Evelynn and none of those champions will be super happy to take this change as they all benefit from the movement speed.
I think the CDR on full build is nice but the champions that this will be more prevalent on (evelynn, nidalee, elise) should *realistically* only need one spell rotation to perform a successful gank. it could be nice for late scaling or teamfights but that's what itemization is meant for.
i like the camp spawns and scuttler changes. what worries me is the single scuttler. it takes away a fair bit of uncounterable vision from a late game objective and rewards junglers for proactively taking it. if it spawns on the wrong side of, say, a mid-game drake, do you think players should be more incentivized to run sneaky dragons or put more eggs into the anti-vision basket? or do you think the 90 second permavision is too powerful and deserves some rng chance?
last thing I wanna get out of my system, I noticed that a lot of RNG comes into the jungle and not into the lanes. plants, drake types, and now scuttler spawns are out of the jungler's hands completely as well as (and probably not as importantly) singular aspects of certain jungle champs' kits like Kayn and Kindred. do you think jungle needs more RNG? do you believe that RNG can make for a competitive game? would you ever consider adding random aspects for lane players?
I appreciate these changes and all the feedback you're giving us.

I keep hearing Karthus is a beast. But I'll wait until players on Live truly prove it before I believe it. I think even the more assassin-like champions you mentioned will probably favor this item. Nidalee has been a big winner because she really likes the mana pool and CDR, despite sharing a lot of the qualities of the above champions.
Jumping to your RNG question: Junglers have the most freedom of movement and cover a lot of territory, so odds are they're going to have access to map systems. More importantly, their gameplay is most prone to going stale. They have a lot of PvE elements and they get solved over the course of a season. Laners get vastly different experiences game to game and even wave to wave. Is their opponent aggressing? Do they have wave control? Did that cannon minion just change its targets and mess up your last-hitting? Did you reach your threshold to clear caster minions out in time? Even more importantly, and not random but certainly out of your hands, is the match-ups change in lane most games. I think we see a lot of frustration when players end up going against the same champions in lane time after time (Caitlyn is what I'm thinking now, but there's probably a better example here). So I do think that random elements can help make for a much better overall experience in the jungle, whereas they're not as needed in the lane. For the jungle, I imagine RNG could make for a lot more interesting skill test where you couldn't count on doing one path game to game and instead had to adapt on the fly to changing circumstances. As for whether it fits in competitive games: I think a lot of competitive games already have these elements and I don't think they're worse off for it. There're ways to make them more palatable and healthy for competitive. For instance, sufficient notice such that you have to respond to a call of action and can assess the risk and value.

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Just 1 thing, if you wanted junglers to go into the enemy jungle more why not bring back smite buffs? They were a good reason to go into the enemy jungle and punish them for ganking by taking away their raptor buff/ taking the wolf buff while also encouraging you to track the enemy jungler to find him when his priority camps are going to be up

When we talk about jungle systems internally I think this and Conservation are the two systems that we talk about most fondly and consider bringing back. Smite buffs are my top choice, though I may be a bit biased because I was involved in a QA capacity on them back in the day.
That said, bringing that system back would be a large undertaking. I think if we were to seriously devote time to it, we may keep one or two of the old buffs (if any). So we'd have to tailor the other ones to suit a particular goal. As much as I enjoyed heightened importance around Razorbeaks, it's hard for me to evaluate how much work these systems were doing, and how much it's just nostalgia for me wanting its return.

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The attack speed removal from Hunter Machete is a huge nerf for auto attack junglers like, Jax, Yi, Trynda. The only reason it was added in the first place was to help these junglers that relied on the old attack speed runes. Why was it changed?

This and the Kindle mechanic were always intended to be temporary measures to assist with the transition to the new Runes world. At the time of release, we didn't want junglers to feel obligated to go Precision and penalized too harshly for going Resolve. Now that splashing lets you dip and have more control over your stats, we felt like they weren't worth keeping around on reevaluation.
There are champions who will be particularly impacted by this and we'll be keeping an eye on whether they need compensation.

For every level ahead you are of a camp you get 5% reduced experience. It kicks in even at fractional amounts of being ahead, and probably accounts for the experience oddities you've seen if you were closely watching experience gain and knew what the camp was supposed to grant.
I think it's a mechanic that has done a lot of work in the past but if we want to see more individual stand-out performances (which we do) it might not be as necessary. We'll see! I haven't seen any unacceptable margins in the past few weeks we've been testing it.

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I honestly liked the version of Runic Echoes on PBE, because it reminds me a lot of Magus and I liked magus while it existed (especially for Fiddle!), especially since it was going to open up the option to buy Luden's on a jungler.
That being said, I do like this coming change to Runic you've shared with us.

Thanks for the feedback. Magus was the inspiration for this iteration. We wanted to test to see if the most generically useful stats would actually be useful to the widest set of champions. That may be true, but in our testing we already ran into negative feedback that encouraged me to move away from the iteration. The lack of the Echoes proc was reduced satisfaction, the increased CDR and lack of a mana return function also made mages OOM more, and overcapping on CDR was restricting some common mage build paths. The posted iteration should address those concerns and hopefully still be a leg up for mages.

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Changing the camp respawn timers hurts catchup XP, since the average game level would be lower since it spawns earlier, which can considerably nerf some play patterns. Is this intended? (not sure if the 15 seconds matters enough though)

We'll be looking out for this. My expectation is 15 second won't dramatically impact this. We're also not really supporting play patterns that revolve around using comeback experience. That's more of a safety net not expected to be used with frequency (and is quite rarely utilized from the numbers we pulled, granted it was last year and my mind is a bit hazy on the specifics).
A potentially more impactful change we're testing out that does matter is that the over-leveled experience penalty has tentatively been removed.

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So why is it important to make scuttles rarer? Seems like there will be a bit of RNG around the really big objectives vision control, which seems especially impactful on pro players (just guessing). you guys must have your reasons but I wondered what it is?

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No xp decrease with the reduced respawn timers? That will 100% sure break champs like Graves, Nidalee... Its basically season 6 all over again but with increased xp because of early season 7 changes. Also don't see how this lowers jungle pressure on lanes since you'll still be getting same xp as live, just the enemy jungler will be what? maybe 1 camp more ahead? Idk about this changes honestly

Experience on the camps is reduced and gradually increased over game time. So there is a reduction, but it's not flat throughout game time. Still working on tuning on this. Our aim isn't to further encourage super heavy farming junglers so we'll do what we can to limit that playstyle taking over.

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Thank you again for listening to feedback, I mean sure we are not professional developers but this is game is loved and I am sure you guys know that. It is VERY rare to find gaming companies that gather feedback and apply their own mark on it in terms of different iterations and what have you. Sure League of Legends has its flaws and the developers get some shit but I am positive you guys understand that and always have the best intentions when it comes to changes. League of Legends is loved and it HIGHLY reminds me of my days back in Vanilla World of Warcraft where Blizzard actually cared for the player-base and had an amazing product. Keep up the good work and hopefully these changes work out for the better :D

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This isn't really a problem but do you think you'll consider adjusting the respawn time so it's a multiple of 10 for easier mental math.
I don't really think it's a priority or anything, just wondering if it's something Riot thinks about if that makes any sense

Yes, we do think about it. I've had multiple conversations on the topic because I broke Rift Scuttler off of a 30 second break point. We were considering if we could go down 30 seconds here, and were hedging towards testing the most extreme version first but I'm quite confident we don't have that much wiggle room.
So, it is a pain point to get off of very easy to track timing numbers but sometimes it's not feasible to stick to those big breakpoints and we need to be a bit more granular.

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Would you consider changing krugs at all?
I feel many avoid the krug camp unless there is absolutely nothing else to do (they have no wards to place, no ganks, no more camps and not enough gold).
Waiting for them to split is infuriating and they definitely don't offer a worthy reward for the time investment.

There reward is amplified as compared to Live. They're also the only remaining quick path to level 3 (if you clear a full Krugs in conjunction with two other camps you'll get your level 3). I expect that'll increase priority on them somewhat.

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Random question from a non-jungler: Why not do something akin to the old Smite buffs (i.e. individual buffs tied to each camp) to make each individual camp potentially worth taking (or provide different advantages/outplay potentials in a Jungle v Jungle scenario?)

Complexity of that type of system is pretty high. Think a lot of us look fondly back on those times, and it's always on the table of something we'd explore again. But, taking some of the nostalgia out of the equation: I think the variety gains we got weren't high enough to justify the complexity. Think my favorite result of the system was that certain camps were undeniably the most powerful (Razorbeaks) and there was more contestation over the camp because of that.

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> [{quoted}](name=Riot Sotere,realm=NA,application-id=A7LBtoKc,discussion-id=MQob4lFt,comment-id=00000004,timestamp=2018-04-27T22:36:10.380+0000)
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> I don&#x27;t want to encourage farm-to-six junglers, which I fear faster respawn timers would do. More downtime early game for a jungler sounds pretty painful. Well, rather, can say it is since we tested versions like that. As per the tank pressure I don&#x27;t have anything too meaningful to contribute. I disagree on how skewed in their favor this current system/balance is.
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{{champion:32}} {{champion:113}} {{champion:9}} {{champion:56}} {{champion:107}} {{champion:72}}
Maple, you may not want to "encourage" farm-to-six junglers, but they exist. There ARE champions who are just BAD without their ultimates. Champions who have low mobility, high mana costs (and no, unless you're changing Talisman to function in the river as well, higher mana regen on Talisman is not going to let these champions duel better when they get caught out) and poor crowd control. And nothing that you are changing is going to make ganking before 6 any easier for them.
So, if you really don't want farm-to-six to be in the game, then just delete Amumu. Make it so that when Malphite has Smite the player is banned. Because there are players who WANT to play tanky champions in the jungle and many of these tanks have kits designed to be absolutely awful in lane.

I'm not Maple. But most of this IS FOR SURE his fault.
Understood that those types of junglers exist. For what it's worth, we are testing out Talisman with mana regen in the river as well. So those champions historically mana gated now aren't completely left out to dry when they try to go into neutral territory.

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> I don't want to encourage farm-to-six junglers, which I fear faster respawn timers would do.
I can tell you & maple have convinced each other of these changes, because [you're both](https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/developer-corner/MQob4lFt-upcoming-jungle-changes-for-810?comment=001c00000003) making the exact same black and white fallacies.

He's my product lead and sits next to me. If I hadn't convinced him, we definitely wouldn't even be putting the changes onto PBE. Sorry if we seem like we're responding with similar responses. He was trying to help me get some responses out and free me up to do some iterations on the systems.

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This will probably force people to perform level 2 ganks on top side (get rid of top laner and then do scuttle). It'll also disproportionately favor purple side because they get red buff to fight with in their initial scuttle skirmish whereas the other is going to get blue.
Edit: it'll probably just make top lane a bit too consistently chaotic near the level 2-3 mark.

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What are your thoughts on having it spawn top side first every game?
* This will delay the jungler's first gank top as well as give your jungler a better chance of spotting the enemy's, relieving some gank pressure.
* Bot-side jungle starts will no longer be de facto if the goal is to secure/contest the first scuttle
* If scuttle spawns bot first, you can count on it impacting the bot lane meta. ADCs will fast push the first wave so they can secure that juicy crab for themselves.

We recently tested out an alternating spawn system for it: top first, then bot, then top, so on. Did have the advantages you mentioned. Major downsides were that it favored red side aggression to the point it'd warp the pre-game: was thought as optimal to combine an aggressive red starting jungler with pushing mid/top. Also made pathing feel a bit more formulaic as opposed to the more dynamic model we have coming to PBE.
Do like top placement better than bottom in that system, though, and could see a world we opted for that model.

Understood. Think we can focus too much on that as developers. We want to give players different experiences game to game so when pathing becomes stale or solved it's very appealing to fix it. Will say that it is one of the lesser goals of these particular changes: we don't want to you vary your path just for variety's sake.
We want to encourage it because we believe the new interactions will be more rich and ultimately fulfilling than the current jungle skill tests.

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ugh I really don't like that change at all...
Its going to feel super snowbally/coinflippy with that scuttle crab, meaning you can't plan ahead on what pathing you'll take because you may or may not be getting scuttle level 2. Not to mention first to get scuttle (which again, is going to depend on which camp start you coinflip to) is going to give one player a lead that the other player won't have the resources to catch up with (like another scuttle to go for..). I like to gameplan at loading screen on which lane I'd be better off assisting, and with this change its instead going to be planning around "ok if i somehow manage to get this scuttle then I can outpressure their jg... if". This also makes invading like the level 2 wolves cheese all the more toxic and uncounterable as that basically gives them a camp, your flash, and their scuttle pretty much free early levels.
IMO you shouldn't do the random 1 scuttle on the map, that just limits playstyles and makes things was more complicated. Keep both scuttles with the change, IMO that's fine, but contesting one RNG scuttle (or even non-rng) just seems unhealthy and unfun and less skill expressive and more "what champ gets this fastest" into the slipperly slope of "nerf early junglers but wait tanks are faster clearers, w.e we'll leave them alone!"
If you wanted to fix the jungle, you should've just mass nerfed a lot of junglers to be strong/weak depending on what their clear strengths are. Example: Is WW an early game champ? I don't know.. he ganks better than all early junglers, he power spikes mid game better then them, he face tanks and still chunks everybody late game.. and he has the healthiest clear in the game to the point of not needing to start pots. I think its fine if a champ for early ganking is early gankiing.. but right now it feels like a lot of champs that play for late game are monsters early game with how healthy and fast they clear, which was previously a weakness of theirs.
I liked when early game junglers camped and their weakness was falling behind later but if they got ahead they could carry the early game for a team advantage... now tanks do that but better, more reliably, and faster without falling off. So basically this is an unchanged problem with these changes and overall the jungle role gets shittier to play.
..Or do the simple "delay first camp spawn" instead of this scuttle rework.. or make camps actually respawn faster so there's something else for us to do beside sit in one lane and hope taxing keeps us early game junglers from falling off a building while their tank just naturally has double our pressure and double our CS
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Oh and how will this work: {{champion:203}}

Responding to different sections in line:
> [{quoted}](name=Tormentula,realm=NA,application-id=A7LBtoKc,discussion-id=MQob4lFt,comment-id=0000,timestamp=2018-04-27T20:15:43.571+0000)
> ugh I really don&#x27;t like that change at all...
Sorry about that. It's a bit expected that the change is contentious and won't fit all jungle playstyles. The aim of making junglers interact with each other has been debated at great length. On the one hand, not all of the JvJ interactions feel particularly rich (you get to that below in more length). On the other, encouraging more PvP and success based on how you play around other champions seems like a big win to me. Right now that PvP primarily comes at the cost of heavily modifying the lane phase of one or a few laners. The hope here is that the JvJ interaction has some nuance and tension that is closer to the champ v. champ interactions in lane than it is to a PvE experience. And at the same time, laners get to have more meaningful match-ups against each other because the path to success of 'camp one lane' isn't always optimal.
> Its going to feel super snowbally/coinflippy with that scuttle crab, meaning you can&#x27;t plan ahead on what pathing you&#x27;ll take because you may or may not be getting scuttle level 2. Not to mention first to get scuttle (which again, is going to depend on which camp start you coinflip to) is going to give one player a lead that the other player won&#x27;t have the resources to catch up with (like another scuttle to go for..). I like to gameplan at loading screen on which lane I&#x27;d be better off assisting, and with this change its instead going to be planning around &quot;ok if i somehow manage to get this scuttle then I can outpressure their jg... if&quot;. This also makes invading like the level 2 wolves cheese all the more toxic and uncounterable as that basically gives them a camp, your flash, and their scuttle pretty much free early levels.
Planning ahead point: We are asking you to somewhat reevaluate your plans/pathing as the game goes on. That's an intended benefit of the system that will cause some friction. Being able to plan out your first five minutes of pathing in the loading screen leads to a rather stale gameplay experience. Not trivializing your point, as it's probably the main negative point of feedback I've received throughout testing this: jungle players highly value setting up a plan for the game in advance. Then we kind of modify our formula based on our success and eventually get to a few standard game plans that work. This skill test is going to be diminished, hopefully in favor of skill tests of reactive planning and how to interact with or avoid the enemy jungler, as you see fit.
> IMO you shouldn&#x27;t do the random 1 scuttle on the map, that just limits playstyles and makes things was more complicated. Keep both scuttles with the change, IMO that&#x27;s fine, but contesting one RNG scuttle (or even non-rng) just seems unhealthy and unfun and less skill expressive and more &quot;what champ gets this fastest&quot; into the slipperly slope of &quot;nerf early junglers but wait tanks are faster clearers, w.e we&#x27;ll leave them alone!&quot;
We're probably just going to have to agree to disagree on this point. I don't find the contesting over early Scuttle less fun and skill expressive than the current jungle meta. It certainly creates some swings because there's a battle over resources. Think that's more interesting than eking out a small creep lead due to slightly more optimal pathing.
> If you wanted to fix the jungle, you should&#x27;ve just mass nerfed a lot of junglers to be strong/weak depending on what their clear strengths are. Example: Is WW an early game champ? I don&#x27;t know.. he ganks better than all early junglers, he power spikes mid game better then them, he face tanks and still chunks everybody late game.. and he has the healthiest clear in the game to the point of not needing to start pots. I think its fine if a champ for early ganking is early gankiing.. but right now it feels like a lot of champs that play for late game are monsters early game with how healthy and fast they clear, which was previously a weakness of theirs.
My original iterations looked kind of like this: I slowed down and made a lot of junglers less healthy early on. There were some benefits: laners felt less pressure. The downside was a lot of junglers returned to PvE as much as possible. So my aim shifted from dramatically slowing them down to instead reducing some of their early spike strength compared to laners and giving them outlets to interact with the other jungler. Then let them grow a lead or deficit more relevant and related to their counterpart.
On the Warwick point: he's pretty solidly an early game jungler. He's arguably been overtuned for awhile so he maintains that strength later into the game than he probably should. The constant pressure from junglers isn't really specific to just a handful of junglers, though: it's a pretty standard strategy from most.
> I liked when early game junglers camped and their weakness was falling behind later but if they got ahead they could carry the early game for a team advantage... now tanks do that but better, more reliably, and faster without falling off. So basically this is an unchanged problem with these changes and overall the jungle role gets shittier to play.
The hope is that early game junglers can flex their muscles in a fashion that's not camping a lane.
> ..Or do the simple &quot;delay first camp spawn&quot; instead of this scuttle rework.. or make camps actually respawn faster so there&#x27;s something else for us to do beside sit in one lane and hope taxing keeps us early game junglers from falling off a building while their tank just naturally has double our pressure and double our CS
I don't want to encourage farm-to-six junglers, which I fear faster respawn timers would do. More downtime early game for a jungler sounds pretty painful. Well, rather, can say it is since we tested versions like that. As per the tank pressure I don't have anything too meaningful to contribute. I disagree on how skewed in their favor this current system/balance is.
> Oh and how will this work: {{champion:203}}
Riot Wrekz is working on some small QoL work for her. We'll be paying close attention to her and other outliers to see if they need additional assistance.

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This is just going to make everyone start taking the unique path I've been taking all season: buff -> buff -> level 2 gank top/mid while the enemy jungler is busy hitting level 3.
I'm going to need a new unique strategy to avoid the enemy jungler now, because... Now there will be a greater than 1% chance of me crossing paths with him (more like 50% now).

Path variation goal: success.
Sorry we're stepping on your toes. I imagine if you're breaking from the standard meta clears currently, there'll be even more room for you to explore and outmaneuver the enemy jungler in the future. Generally speaking, we've seen notably less quick gank routes in our playtests. I imagine your route would still be quite surprising to laners, and therefore more likely to succeed.

You get the standard minute advanced notice with our usual buff camp timers. We're looking into making those show up earlier but right now they're consistent with the other camps and have proven to be ample notice to modify plans.

Ivern is one of the big winners of these changes. We'll actually have to keep a close eye on him because the combination of his 8.9 buffs with these jungle changes might be too favorable. In particular, more mana regeneration early gives him more flexibility with his pathing and less reliance on smiting Blue early on.
He has unique control of camps so if he opts into using his smite, his take of Rift Scuttler is going to be harder to contest than the average champion.

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Are you worried about niche lane champions being able to take the first Scuttle right away for an early lead, or maybe with Smite and Unsealed Spellbook?
Edit: I looked some things up in the wiki to answer this myself. It should only be worth it if you can kill Scuttle before the melee minions of your first wave die because those three combined are worth a little more exp than Scuttle on its own. The only rewards you would get otherwise are a little more gold and denying Scuttle from both Junglers. Since it's random where Scuttle spawns, this doesn't seem like a reliable tactic. I doubt any mid laner can deal 1200 damage (with Smite) and get back to lane in time for this.

Not particularly worried. It spawns late enough that there's a pretty heavy cost to take it from what we've seen. As with other jungle camps, some of the value of taking it is amplified by jungle items so it's less worthwhile if you don't have a Talisman/Machete.

We had this in testing for quite a long while when we were working on her update. We opted to make her rely on her Tunnel cooldown if she wanted to dive in and then escape. That said, at varying points she also had a lot more mobility on her kit with lower cooldown on E and multiple charges.
If she needed buffs I could see us giving her a bit more mobility but I don't know what tool we'd do it through. The ultimate tunnel was often weird because of varying distances and most often not being ideal to go straight back where she came from.

I doubt it actually made him move that much. When you get smaller sample sizes (slicing down one region and one MMR group) you sometimes get misleading data.
Our early reports on data showed him barely moving in high elo (+.1%) and moving decently at all elo (+1.5%). The latter would be along the lines of my expectation for this buff on a jungler who is actually being kept down by getting too punished in the jungle.

Definitely of the opinion that you'll be able to learn Nocturne faster. He's a bit easier than Evelynn to get a hang of and he seems to match your two strengths: engaging and assassinating people.
I would look at some fansites for the best builds and follow them until you get a hang of him and can make your own more informed choices. Think both Electrocute and Dark Harvest are pretty good on him. Pretty important to focus on getting to six fast and then picking your targets for ultimate wisely.

One thing that throws me off is you have to throw your next auto-attack to get the benefit, IIRC. So when testing I'd immediately check my stats after dashing and get sad about it being broken.
Should work though!

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> [{quoted}](name=The Oasis,realm=NA,application-id=yrc23zHg,discussion-id=z0mQROuZ,comment-id=0000,timestamp=2017-10-25T05:37:28.253+0000)
>
> Why does this make him strong? Just better payout for Gromp or something?
nobody tell him

> [{quoted}](name=Bionic Jellyfish,realm=NA,application-id=yrc23zHg,discussion-id=z0mQROuZ,comment-id=00000000,timestamp=2017-10-25T05:43:40.368+0000)
>
> nobody tell him
Tell him what? Now that it's harder for opposing junglers to track exactly where I am, I've found a lot more success in playtests with jungle Jhin. I use some well placed traps to protect my entrances and farm up a storm.
I still haven't quite yet decided whether Phase Rush or Dark Harvest is optimal. Going fast is quite fun, but the extra burst out of the gates really makes his ganks shine. Reasons I think he'll be the next big breakout marksman jungler:
1. Can add a root to his ganks. No other current marksmen junglers have hard CC.
2. He'll be more safe in his jungle due to enemy junglers not being able to find him.
3. Excellent synergy with aggressive Runes.
4. cs per camp

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> [{quoted}](name=MysterQ,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=okMW1rUO,comment-id=0003,timestamp=2017-10-26T06:15:52.871+0000)
>
> If you have a bug, please report it in the proper section.
Bug? these are just his overbuffs

I think maybe he was suggesting that the damage was so high that it must be a bug, and therefore should be reported elsewhere. Pretty clever. :)
It is not a bug, for what it's worth. We're closely watching his performance and will decide if he needs a micropatch before the weekend.
When playtesting him, we settled on his optimal build being a 1-2 AP items into a tankier build. Full AP was tested but in competitive games with similar skilled players (our playtest team) it was very volatile and had less success. Think it's yet to be seen which is the best way to play him for pure winning's sake. It was certainly intended to be a buff for players that wanted to be aggressive but it's possible we went to far in letting him blow people up. Winds of War may not be able to carry so much of his offensive output.

He got a pick and subsequently some bans by and against G2 in Worlds. He's pretty vulnerable early in the jungle, which I suspect is a reason a lot of people stay away from him.
Re-watched most of that game. He actually had pretty good presence. Helped get first blood. Got 3 buffs on second jungle clear so both his top and mid got red. Will be curious to see if he gets more play if bot laners try to punish the greedy gold generation starts.
Think he's good if you're mastering him in solo queue, too. Probably isn't someone who you can flex into. So if you don't have a lot of games on him you probably wouldn't pick him just because a team needed Ardent.

Also not Meddler but can chime in. Last set of changes did a decent amount of work.
Think he's strong enough to be picked into certain situations and provides a unique experience. We don't have any immediate plans for him so the next big thing that'll change him (indirectly) is probably Runes Reforged.

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> but this weekend had me second guessing. Contractz looked like a beast on him in the C9 v. EDG game.
Can you guys PLEASE stop balancing around competitive? The fact that Riot takes ***A SINGLE*** competitive game into account when making balance decisions is insane. Why in the world would you ever even consider a single game over the thousands upon thousands of games we actually play? Nobody cares what does and doesnt work for the top 0.01% of players. Balance the game for the other 99.99% of us

Ack. Didn't mean to suggest that this one game would change our minds or discount the fact that Graves seems too weak generally. When I'm struggling with a champion I like to seek out inspiration and strategies from others' play. So I was pointing OP in that direction so he could see one path to success.
That said, as long as I'm on the team I'll be taking competitive games into consideration. Even a single one demonstrates quite a bit to me. In this case, it means that in one of the most important games in most of C9's players careers they felt like Graves was their best option. Often when I'm looking at truly weak champions there is no realistic situation where said weak champion is the best pick.
A pick in competitive is also no rare happenstance thing. When I see that, I assume that not only do these professionals think that it's the best pick for the situation but that they have also practiced it abundantly in scrimmages AND have been getting good results from the pick.
It doesn't overwhelm all the other data we have in hand but to me it is a very meaningful point to consider.

I think we may be somewhat blinded by our love for Ornn.
Let me explain: There is no champion we've talked more about in the past month on my team (Live Gameplay). There's no champion we've played more on Live over the past month. Playtest team also mentioned to me in passing that they have a disproportionate amount of Ornn mains and Ornn games on Live. There is something that draws us to Ornn and makes us think his cap is really high. There are so many optimizations to be made around utilizing his Living Forge passive. His ultimate has massive pick and team fight potential, but is frequently misused.
We recognize that he's not winning a lot of his games right now. We do think he has things that draw people towards him: buying in lane is addictive. Helping your team scale up beyond six items is quite appealing to players from what we've seen. Clapping people with hammers feels damn good, at least to me.
We buffed his mana costs last patch and I thought that would move the needle substantially. It didn't help him as much as I estimated, so we're following up in 7.20.
I think Ornn's highs are very HIGH. In 7.20 I tried to focus on making his lows not as painful.
* Searing Charge (E) is more generous when charging into walls so you should have fewer (hopefully zero!) cases where your dash doesn't do a slam but it looks like your horns are grazing the wall.
* Bellows Breath (W) is now max Health damage. I really wanted to push for this direction because it erases some odd optimizations, like wanting to Volcanic Rupture (Q) after Bellows Breath. A consistently feel bad moment for me was also estimating my damage incorrectly: my first trades with champions would be so impactful I'd all in and then be surprised by my damage ramping down. Hopefully this pays dividends in Ornn players assessing their kill threat.
* Call of the Forge God (R)'s second cast is now instant. This was contentious because the planning and deliberate nature of Ornn's ultimate is partly what made it feel good for those who enjoyed it. But often due to incidental CC and timing issues, R was too difficult to utilize in team fights. I think after a brief re-learning curve, this will allow Ornn to have more consistent output in team fights.

We have some buffs for him in 7.20 that should help in both positions. I was of the impression he was quiet a bit below par, but this weekend had me second guessing. Contractz looked like a beast on him in the [ C9 v. EDG game](http://matchhistory.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/#match-details/TRLH1/1002390418?gameHash=90e4cd74c1a4e2c1&tab=overview).
Was a good showing of how to keep a lot of pressure on the enemy jungler with Graves' early strength.
Good luck out there on the Rift and I hope the upcoming changes help you enjoy him a bit more. :)

:
gargoyle stone plate dont give hp... it gives a bonus hp effect
lets take in the changes to gargoyle
Gargoyle Stoneplate
Health granted by Stoneplate's active's is now partially base health, rather than entirely bonus health.
Making good on last patch’s promise, we’ve got a set of changes to mitigate Stoneplate’s oversynergies with a few specific effects. Most importantly, Stoneplate now knows the difference between base health and bonus health. The total health granted is the same as before (with two exceptions—see below), but Stoneplate will contribute far less to effects that scale with bonus health as a result of this change—Cho’Gath’s ult and Locket’s shield being the two most notorious offenders here.
http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/patch/patch-718-notes#patch-items
Grants base health equal to 40% (or 100%) base health and bonus health equal to 40% (or 100%) bonus health
so with the changes it reduced the damage by 19%
https://imgur.com/TJ1XyVf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmQ_eWd6cps
57:55
so he got a good nerf

We additionally nerfed his primary rush item with Righteous Glory going up in price by 150g. Made his lane less safe against certain match-ups with Bramble Vest costing 100g more in 7.19.
I was tasked to investigate him further for 7.20 but gave the suggestion we hold off. As you can imagine it was a contentious proposal. But, his ban rate is dropping. His win rate certainly isn't out of line in my opinion. I'm pretty confident players will continue to find more champions to counter him as the systems favor him less.
I think we definitely have levers to pull if we need to nerf him. Some of the directions I found most promising were as follows:
1. **Reduce the consistency of his crowd control chaining.** Probably would aim at an E duration nerf for this.
2. **Make his scaling less guaranteed.** He gets to uber tank status pretty easily with mostly minion Feasts. Easy-ish option would be to lower the number he can get from feasting low priority targets.
3. **Make him pay a higher cost for his damage. ** If he wants massive Feasts we could make him build more AP. This is a more dangerous direction as I personally don't think Mage Cho is a particularly compelling pattern but for someone building no offensive items he's probably doing too much damage.
I'm sure we'll keep an eye on Cho'Gath in the next couple of patches and the next designer assigned may come to a different conclusion than I did. I'm not sure my reasoning will be particularly comforting for the OP but I wanted to allay any fears that we're ignoring Cho.

:
> [{quoted}](name=Riot Sotere,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=VwV808wg,comment-id=00010000,timestamp=2017-10-03T07:15:01.016+0000)
>
> Yah. That&#x27;s not intentional.
Everyone knows it's a bug. But seeing as I don't understand coding I can't wrap my head around how something like this happens.
How about making a champion that does this in future :P

Doesn't seem like something we'd want to build a champion around. My guess is it's not a complex coding thing but a mistaken decimal somewhere. We're changing a lot of numbers for preseason so my best guess is this is a simple input error.

This is a pragmatic way to go about it. At that stage in the game I'd normally opt for the top laner. The best case scenario there is he creates tons of pressure on his own and gets an isolated Herald after killing his opponent.

Whenever I get stuck on feeling like I'm having lower impact on my games than I should be, I search out for people who're more successful. I've seen fwii's top Talon smoke a number of games including my own so hunted to see if he had any guides. He actually has quite a few out there! Haven't done a full read through but I saw some insightful nuggets in this guide [HERE](http://www.lolking.net/guides/422811) (lolking site).
Carrying often isn't solely about what you can do in late game team fights, but how you get your teammates ahead leading up to that point. Good luck. :)

That's a pretty good list. Think you could narrow your picks down by 1 in each role and still be fine.
The other thing that strikes me about your selections is those are quite difficult champions. It takes a lot of games to master Azir and Anivia, for instance. I might primarily focus on one of those champions and then fill the rest of your roster up with champions that are easier to learn.

Appreciate it. I'll pass the word on to the main designer on the project. :)
Think it was a risk to modify his gameplay so straight AA'ing people down isn't always the best call but so far we're happy to see how it's settling . We will keep a close watch on him and make sure he continues to deliver on his fantasy.

Heyas! Not a dumb question. Our playtest lead bros mentioned what they were looking for in their last Reddit call out for applicants: [Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/5yoq2d/serious_playtesters_wanted_again/)
You can also check our https://www.riotgames.com/careers page for openings. Currently there's no Playtester spot that I see open, but I talked to their lead and he hinted that they may be looking for people soon.
Don't think there's a simple answer on how to get onto the balance team. We're mostly comprised of QA and Designers, but we're growing to include other disciplines like Engineering, VFX, SFX, and animation. So you have to pick your route accordingly. One of our QA came from the Playtest team. Two of our designers were previously interns on the team. 3 others were previously QA on other teams.